If There Is Such a Thing as Dignity: Scenes of Silence in de Vigny’s ‘The Death of the Wolf’
If There Is Such a Thing as Dignity: Scenes of Silence in de Vigny’s ‘The Death of the Wolf’

Summary/Abstract: The concept of human dignity has recently become a contested idea in at least two ways: either because of the growing difficulty to limit dignity to the human, or because the very notion of dignity has come to appear too unstable to serve as a conceptual tool for the purposes of defining humanity. This paper investigates the ways in which the figure of silence might be linked to these critical considerations. It starts out with a reflection on the concept of dignity from the perspective of human-animal relations by reference to the universal declarations of human and animal rights, as well as to the Derridean treatment of the question of the animal. Then it pays close attention to three scenes of silence in Alfred de Vigny’s romantic poem ‘The Death of the Wolf’, and attempts to trace how silence is associated both with sublime morality, or dignity, and a primordial state of permanent threat and violence ‒ the upshot being that this figural ambivalence of silence does not leave intact our modern notion of dignity and in fact indicates an intrinsic instability at the heart of the concept.

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